There are plenty of North American filmmakers influenced by the giants of international cinema. These filmmakers import stylistic references, different tones and rhythms, perhaps key collaborators, such as a cinematographer, to films that nonetheless are born of their own local filmmaking cultures. For his second feature, following the anarchic political satire of his The Twentieth Century, Canadian director Matthew Rankin has imagined a different approach. His formally precise and very funny Universal Language, a Cannes's Directors Fortnight discovery this year, is not only influenced by the Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, among others, but considers a Winnipeg — home to filmmakers such as the iconic Guy Maddin — that is, as he says, a kind of fantastical… Read more
“Please stop me if any of the terms don’t make sense.” A few days before his feature debut, Eephus, will premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight, Carson Lund is sitting on a rooftop terrace in Cannes and worrying I may not catch all the jargon. Understandably. A chronicle of the last baseball game played at Soldiers Field in Douglas, MA before the grounds will be paved over and replaced by a middle school, the chat’s testing my—admittedly limited—knowledge of the sport. Yet how you’ll respond to Lund’s wistful film won’t depend on your level of inside baseball. It will depend on how much you like old guys, people who’re watching the world they love as it falls indelibly into the past,… Read more
Harmony Korine's AggroDr1ft unfurls through sheets of kaleidoscopic color — neon shades of gold, aqua and red — that ripple and pulse, achieving almost an intelligence of their own as they add expressionistic textures to the film's Miami-set tale of a melancholy hitman out for a demonic Final Boss. And while the narrative recalls, at times, Robert E. Howard, Michael Mann and Grand Theft Auto, the film's genuinely unique method of production allows its hallucinatory vibe — aided by an insidious AraabMuzik score — to reign supreme. Working with his team at new production outfit EDGLRD, including creative director Joao Rosa, who oversaw the film's VFX, Korine lensed the film using thermal cameras, producing solarized black-and-white image that he then… Read more
I somehow lost my Sundance 2024 hat before arriving in Cannes. I was forced to take it off for the automated passport control in Paris, as it would’ve obscured my face too much for the fancy camera technology that only worked for about every third person in line. Walking to my next terminal with my luggage, it started raining and I went to put my hat on only to realize it was no longer poking out from the top of my purse. How is it that I managed to lose my one token of legitimacy immediately upon arriving in France? Of course, a baseball cap is far afield from what I’ve been told “Cannes attire” is. One exec friend told… Read more
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to have cost $120 million of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal money. That’s the kind of extravagant gesture you don’t get to ever see on this scale, and hence destined to be praised for being willed into existence amidst a sea of algorithimically conceived risk-aversion—or, alternately, decried as a hubristic folly in the trades with a palpable subtext of “how dare he?” Megalopolis is praiseworthy for mostly predictable reasons: lavish eccentricity, undeniable ambition, relentless novelty. That I’m skeptical of it comes down to Coppola’s intellectual project, which is sometimes surprisingly coherent… Read more
“Last year, as you know, we had a few polemics,” admitted Cannes General Delegate Thierry Fremaux at the opening of the 77th edition on Tuesday. “This year we decided to host a festival without polemics to make sure that the main interest for us all to be here is cinema.” With ignorance this willful, you have to laugh. Cannes has gotten so used to sweeping its problems under the rug that no one seems to know when, how, or if the Sous les Écrans la Dèche strike–-which would affect some 200 projectionists, programmers, floor managers, and press officers working the festival—was or will be avoided, and therefore whether or not we’ll be let in to any given screening. Judith Godrèche’s… Read more
At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real estate market event,” taking place in March and drawing 26,000+ people—a number handily dwarfing the 13,000+ market attendees, plus assorted press and filmmakers, at last year’s festival. It was a useful perspective check: if Cannes is roundly conceded the status of world’s biggest film festival when all components are accounted for, that doesn’t mean too much in the global scheme of things, where cinema, as we keep being told, is waning in relevance and generally in deep trouble. An appropriately doom-laden mood was nicely set by… Read more